The One Where They Fight..... AGAIN
Jim Lee can't seem to decide on any kind of rhyme or reason to balancing out team members on the covers. Why is Flash the central figure here? I mean, overall this cover is a perfectly fine idea with nice execution, but there's no thought put into who got put where. If ANYBODY should've gotten put front and center it should be Wonder Woman.
Jim Lee's art is seriously on fire though. All the jagged edges of Graves' costume look awesome, and the ghosts look very smooth and ephemeral. The League all look great as usual, and everyone's facial expressions are intense without going over the top, in fact there's a lot of great panels in this issue that really focus on people's eyes and the amazing detail in them.
The problem in this issue is, same as most, the writing. This arc has fluctuated wildly in the portrayal of the League. It's like Geoff Johns keeps forgetting if he's writing the league in the past or the present. Their infighting is getting old fast, the team doesn't have to ALWAYS be smooth and effective, but when Wonder Woman starts smashing everyone else in an emotional rage not half a year after the arc where they all smashed each other up when they first met.... and then argued AGAIN in the two issues between arcs.... it's just getting annoyingly overused very quickly. And her provocation is a little weak. I understand that she's worried about Steve, but is she dumb enough to think taking a few minutes to plan is better than charging in blind on her own? Or that the rest of the League suddenly wouldn't want to go with her? I get the general idea behind why she did it, it was just very poorly handled.
Also the friction between Justice League's continuity and the rest of the DCU's continuity is further ground when Superman mentions his father still died of a heart attack, like in Brainiac. Except, that was retconned by the Kents dying before Clark went to Metropolis. I mean, yes, sure, he still could've died of a heart attack; but the way he talks about it here seems like he's trying to say it happened the way it did in Brainiac.
It's also a little odd that the arc title was suddenly dropped, and that the story is apparently going to be resolved in just one more issue.
I REALLY want SHAZAM to just have his own series. SERIOUSLY DC! WHY IS HE JUST A CO-FEATURE RANDOMLY TAGGED ON HERE!? He doesn't connect to the main comic like every other co-feature you have does. It's just... "Here's an unrelated $1 comic that you have to buy with this one!" I'd buy SHAZAM as it's own ongoing, I'd MUCH PREFER doing that. Do you just HAVE to make Justice League $4 because it's your headliner? For shame, DC. You're better than that, you're not Marvel. I mean, I'm glad you have the common decency to actually give us SOMETHING REASONABLE to justify the extra dollar, but in this case it's just too random, it's too obviously a ploy for squeezing money out of us.
Because frankly, I MUCH prefer SHAZAM to Justice League at this point. Justice League is frequently dragged down by extravagant smashdowns, obnoxious infighting, and Geoff Johns being dumb and refusing to play nice with the entire rest of the New 52, even his own other series'. SHAZAM on the other hand is deep, heartwarming, and intriguing. IT JUST MOVES TOO GODDAMN SLOW. Why? Because it only gets 10 freaking pages a month! And this is a much more slow burn story than Justice League, it NEEDS the pages.
In Conclusion: 3.5/5
Sigh. Geoff Johns keeps swinging between awesome and dumb on Justice League. He seems to be actively ignoring every other series, and at least the art is fantastic. But I care so much more about the emotional tale of Billy Batson, about to FINALLY become Captain Marvel, in the pages of SHAZAM. And I hate how obvious a greedy stunt this is as a co-feature. It really deserves to be it's own ongoing, neither series is doing the other any favors by being together.
